Gorilla Marketing: Framing Poverty

by Leigh Graham

categories: Children, Culture of Poverty, News, Race Ethnicity Class & Gender, Social Programs, The Economy, Women

Published July 21, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT

As I was writing my brilliantly titled blog post this morning about California's budget cuts, :), I kept thinking about this report I heard on WBUR this morning concerning Mass. Governor Deval Patrick's proposed budget cuts and the impact on the state's zoos.  The story ruefully points to the "benefit" of having two newspapers in Boston (for how much longer, one wonders) and how their warring coverage of the threatened euthanizing of zoo animals due to budget reducations distracted us from the direct human impact of those cuts.

"All the while this Animal House drama played out, other victims of the governor’s budget vetoes – from senior care to education to services for children and families – were virtually ignored.

Which brings us to the third eternal truth of budget-cut coverage: It’s a zero-sum game. Every photo of Little Joe displaces an image of elderly hardship or shuttered libraries.

That’s guerrilla warfare of an entirely different kind."

Pun intended! Chortle, chortle.

But in all seriousness, I get that reduction in amenities like zoos, libraries, music classes, etc. have a detrimental impact on our quality of life and human development.  But, I'd argue, so does leaving our elderly to ration their meds or to let kids' asthma go untreated or to relinquish teens to idle, hot summer afternoons with little to do.  I was one who fell prey to the zoo story (heh). I pay a remarkable little amount of attention to local politics given I was raised in this state and have been back for 5 years now, but I went so far as to post the zoo story on facebook, chuckling at the idea of the zoo admin holding the legislature hostage with threats of dead animals and weeping children.  (The zoos' cuts were restored.)

I'm not sure what lesson to take here: reporter John Carroll's original point that kids and animals are winning causes every time, or the uglier, flip side of that that hearing about poor grandma eating her cat food or freezing to death in the winter makes us so uncomfortable that we'd rather just not hear about it.  Why is that?  I get our easy moralizing about poor mothers, given we're a society that believes we have the right to legislate reproductive behavior.  But why don't we feel a similar level of protectiveness for our elders as we do for kids?  Am I way off here?  Social Security is fairly sacrosanct; so maybe I'm wrong.

But there's no denying that people are much more jazzed about their pets or zoo charges than they are their most vulnerable neighbors.